Michael Eagar | Internet Entrepreneur

One of the greatest ways to find online opportunities is by Generating Business Ideas from Online Forums. 
Online forums provide a way for people to share information.  Forums are
often devoted to a specialized topic and usually require registration with them
before you are allowed to post a comment.  So how do you find business
ideas in forums?  Here are some things to consider:

• Find forums that deal with
  your industry, or the sector that you are interested in competing
  in.  To locate forums, try going to the search engines and typing in
  the market you want to compete in and the word “forum”. 
  You can also try to contact people you know in your network that are in
  the market that you want to compete in and ask them what forums they visit
  or belong to.
• What do you look for in the
  forums?  Forums can often discuss problems (market needs) that
  members are experiencing.  Other forum members will often try to
  provide answers and solutions to help that forum member fix the
  problem.  Most of the time, these solutions are not real interesting
  to Internet Entrepreneurs like myself.  The solutions are well known
  by skilled people, or the knowledge is not hard to get.  But once in
  a while, there are some solutions that you see an opportunity for. 
  Maybe you could wrap that solution into a script or a program and sell it
  to others that are having the same problem.  Maybe you could offer an
  ebook on how to solve that problem.  Maybe the solution is similar to
  other problems you are aware of (by staying informed with as much media,
  trends, etc. as possible).
• Forums that discuss trends
  are also interesting.  Market or industry trends are an important
  factor in identifying business opportunities.  There are tons of
  forums that offer statistics and trends of many kinds.  Some forums
  release industry trends and some forums release trends about their users. 
  Trends can be very important.
• Some forums are designed to
  share business ideas and help members to meet each other in the hopes of
  developing a business relationship.  These forums are among my
  favorites, because I like to see what ideas people are coming up with, and
  although these forums are not generally industry specific, they are
  extremely valuable for general Internet Entrepreneurs that look for a
  variety of online business opportunities.

Forums are communities that share information.  They
can be a great place to gather information as well.  A lot of an entrepreneur’s
time is devoted to finding business opportunities, and Generating Business
Ideas from Online Forums are one good way to do that.

I recently gave a workshop on Creating and Expanding a Website Business. The workshop was 2 hours and at the request from others here is some of the important information that was covered:

The Entrepreneur - You really need to evaluate yourself when you create a business whether online or offline. What are your strengths and weaknesses? Do you have the skills necessary to create or expand your website business. Do you have support from other team members or connections with people that could help you in the business? Do you have the drive and commitment needed to see the website business through. Really evaluate your self and try to identify your personal abilities regarding a website business.

The Idea/Opportunity - How do you know your idea can make money? Have you done any research on your business idea? Can you identify your competitors? how large is your online market? How Have you thought about what business and revenue models you will have on your website? Is your website business going to be a full-time or part-time activity for you? How do you define success, what does it look like to you?

Creating a Website - What are the goals of your website? What is your strategy? What will you do differently than your competitors? How will you measure success? What are the parts to creating a website (such as the domain name, the website design, the hosting, the content, the maintenance, the logo/branding, and other functions such as ecommerce/shopping cart, etc.)

Creating a Website - the Tools. Will you do the work or have others like professionals or your neighbor do the work? There are professional services that can help you with domains, design, hosting, marketing (SEO/SEM), analytics, web development, etc.

Launching a Website - Load your site with a host provider, test it and make sure it is functional. Have friends or customers evaluate or beta test the site to see if it generally satisfies the needs and goals you are looking for.

Promoting a Website - Making money. Do you have a marketing plan. Did you have a marketing plan when you developed your strategy before you created your site? How do you plan to review traffic and analytics? What tools will you use? How do you get other sites to link to your site? How do you plan to get customers? How do you plan to show up on the search engines (SEO/SEM)? Do you know your target keywords? What is your keyword strategy?

Driving Traffic to a Website - What is your revenue strategy? Do you offer a FREE product or service? Do you belong to any affiliate programs? Will you have ads on your site? If so, are they partner ads or ads from search engines? Are you selling products or services? How do you partner with others in or out of your industry?

These are the topics I discussed in the Creating and Expanding a Website Business workshop, and within a week many students have followed my methods of quick and easy, sometimes free or inexpensive ways to start your internet business. The workshop is offered for free, and is not yet available online. If you are interested in attending an upcoming FREE workshop, or if you are interested in the online version of this workshop (in development), please email me at michaelsblog (insert “at” sign) gmail (insert “dot” symbol) com.

There is a current debate in the SEO/M community concerning Google Rankings and Code Validation.  The issue can be stated in the question - Do the search engines care about a websites valid code?  This question alone does not show the relationship between search engines and valid code, so I will add some questions of my own.

1. Do the search engines give value to sites with valid code?  It is generally thought within the SEO/M community that they do not explicitly or noticeably give special credit to websites with valid code.  Many will argue that this can be tested by simply looking at sites with invalid code consistently coming up with #1 rankings on the search engines.  I think this argument has some obvious weaknesses, but the generally accepted answer to the question here is NO.
2. Does having valid code affect search engine ranking?  It is also generally accepted in the SEO/M community that the answer to this question is NO.  However, some have claimed that they have noticed a difference in their search engine rankings by only improving code validation.  Recently a friend in the SEO/M community claims that he also noticed a big difference in search engine ranking by correcting code validation errors.
3. Does having valid code affect your site’s search engine performance?  The argument here is that having certain invalid code such as open/close tags that are missing can affect what the search engines use as a description, cache, or presentation of your site.  Although I have never seen this, others claim that they have seen the search engines display information about their site that was a result of open/close tag problems for example.  I tend to think that the search engine bots (robots/spiders/etc.) have some AI or smart technology to be able to recognize code errors and fill in the gaps.  The answer to this question seems to remain a mystery.

I tend to think that this is not a major issue affecting the SEO/M community because any affect that code validation may have on your site has little to no consequence.  Nevertheless, code validation can help you identify some presentation problems on your site, and if some of the SEO/M marketers are correct in their testing of positive differences in the search engines because of code validation, well, you just might be better off with a “better safe than sorry” mentality when it comes to Google Rankings and Code Validation.  Most SEO/M companies recommend having valid code on your site(s).

I am excited for the 100,000 Dollar Utah Business Plan Competition sponsored by FundingUniverse and Grow Utah Ventures. and the Utah Governor’s Economic Summit  Both organizations are doing some great things, and the timing could not be better.  Here are some of the details:

• Cost to apply - FREE
• When - March 22nd, 2007
• Where - Grand America Hotel (SLC)
• Who - All companies seeking equity funding

More details here Summit.  Don’t miss out on this great opportunity.  If anything else, you are in for a great experience.

I went to an Internet Marketing training recently where the attendees were primarily small website business owners. There was a question raised regarding Blogging Taking the Place of Emailing. Basically stated it was, “Why should I blog and allow comments and questions from my customers when I could just email them back?”

How many times have you answered the same question to more than one customer? If you answer 1 or more, this is a great reason to blog. Getting rid of the redundancies of business is one great reason to blog, here are some others I have found:

• It provides a great way to connect to your customer audience and understand their needs
• It shows that you are open enough to post customer feedback (hopefully neutral and unmoderated)
• You show everyone not just your emailed customers what kind of an expert you are
• It is a great way to keep your website “fresh” (search engines love fresh content)
• it gives people one more reason to link to your site
• It also exposes your ideas or topics to a potentially large audience. This exposure can generate new partnerships, customers, and fans

I think that if you have an online business of some kind, you should be blogging instead of emailing some types of information to your customers/potential customers.

Lately I have talked with several companies that are involved in Utah Outsourcing. Yet many businesses are still skeptical about outsourcing. Here are some things to consider:

• Outsourcing can free up expensive talent so they can focus more of their time on innovating
• Research before putting all your eggs in, I recommend starting slowly and then build from there
• Treat your offshore partners equal partners
• Be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort in training, quality control, working through expectations, etc.
• Outsourcing has doubled productivity in two Utah companies I have worked with
• Our average training time takes between 50-60 hours
• Once trained, our average monitoring time takes 1 hour per week
• Outsourcing is not for every company, or every project

India has the bulk of the outsourcing done by the U.S. (Business Week Jan 30, 06), but many of the companies I work with use China and Southeast Asia, my company included. We are expanding our outsourcing in the coming months to South America, and so far our best experience has come from Philippines and Thailand.

I heard recently about a new company that was involved with CNet founder Halsey Minor that created Swivel - Internet Chart Tool. This is a fascinating area of Internet research that I have become involved in. The idea is that you can compare data with other data creating some interesting chart comparisons. Check out the chart below that I pulled off their website:

I really like what they have done here, especially the usability and features on the site. Great job. Look for more success later this year from the startup Swivel - Internet Chart Tool. You can check them out here Swivel.com.

I recently came across a tool that is not really that new but getting some good attention.  It is the Alexaholic Research Tool at Alexaholic.com.  Fast Company magazine did a spot on it in their March 07′ issue. 

Alexaholic does a good job of comparing up to five urls, and shows you the “alexa” traffic for each site on a comparison graph.  However, it does not give you any additional data that you could not get from Alexa.com.  This tool is essentially useless.  Alexaholic, like so many web businesses does not add much value to the service they are offering.  So what if it is free, if you are going to create a valuable service, you need to know what other similar services are doing.  This tool is old, and it does not give me valuable data.  It is simply another site out there that is powered by Alexa.com, but is missing the added value component.

Not worth checking out, but you can see the Alexaholic Research Tool at alexaholic.com.

Here are some of the Local Utah Bloggers I follow:

• Alex McArthur - Everything
• Amy Rhoads - Organization, Business
• Blake Snow - Entrepreneurship
• Brock Blake - Entrepreneurship
• Chris Sandberg - Entrepreneurship
• Gary Thornock - Technology, Politics
• Janet Meiners - Affiliate & Internet Marketing
• Jeff Barson - Entrepreneurship, Musings
• Jeff Jordan - Entrepreneurship
• Jimmy Zimmerman - Tech, Business
• John Jonas - Internet Marketing
• Joshua Steimle - Business, Internet
• Kory Hoopes - General
• Matthew Sederberg - General
• Michael Eagar - Young Entrepreneurship
• Michael Ebert - Internet
• Neal Harmon - Entrepreneurship, Education
• Paul Allen - Business Ideas, Philosophy
• Phil Burns - Tech, Business
• Richard Miller - Internet, Religion
• Roger Andrus - Book Notes
• Ryan Money - Entrepreneurship
• Scott Lemon - Tech
• Todd Wilson - Internet Software
• Trent Miskin - Tech, Business
• Tyler Jensen - Tech
• Yvette Arts - Content

Take some time and get acquainted with blogging.  I am sure you can ask any one of these Local Utah Bloggers if blogging has helped them in business.

Wordtracker announced recently their new Keyword Suggestion Tool located here: Wordtracker Tool. It is free, and I really like it to compare with Overture’s Suggestion Tool. It also seems to be 2 or 3 times quicker. One thing to notice about this is the dates from which searches were done. Also note that unlike Overture they do not factor in plurals but seperate them. Overture’s data is more reliable based on their sampling, but I like this new tool from Wordtracker.